


Beyond All Reason

by incidental



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 11:53:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2731496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incidental/pseuds/incidental
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla reflects on three hundred years of understanding, and not understanding at all. Hollstein fluff because I can't get enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond All Reason

**Author's Note:**

> I like the way Laura/Elise Bauman talks. She has this sort of round, relaxed, distinctly Midwestern American/Canadian way of saying vowels that I adore, as it reminds me of my family up north. Being a Southerner and thusly struck with the extra-lazy vowel twang, it's a different sound to me, and honestly that was part of the inspiration for this piece. The rest is just all the Hollstein feels. Enjoy!

She has no idea.

As Carmilla listened to her making small talk with the barista in passable German, heavily tinged with her impossibly sweet Canadian vowels that always sounded pleasantly out of place, she had no idea how much Carmilla loved her. None.

She couldn’t, she simply hadn’t been around long enough to know. It annoyed Laura infinitely when Carmilla said that kind of thing— _If you’d been around as long as I have,_ or, _When you’ve seen the things I’ve seen_ —but it was true. Being alive for over 300 years does not have many advantages, but inarguably one of them is life experience. Carmilla had simply had more time and opportunity to screw up and learn than Laura, and one of the things she had learned was the vast, hopeless, consuming, complete and utter devastation love could wreak upon a person.

And this wasn’t it.

This wasn’t a love that devastated or consumed. It did not lay to waste like a war or a storm. This was not Vienna, or the Balkans. This was not her Mother’s love, or William's obsession. This was not the hopeless love she had for Ell, a love that could never be returned, a love that was met with revile. That was not love, and it took a century, but she could see that now. Some things take a hundred years to work through, but eventually you get there. Again, perk of life experience.

Carmilla had experienced many kinds of love in her exhausting life up to the present, but none of them, absolutely none, had been like this. She could listen to Laura’s round, leisurely, out-of-place vowels fall through the sky like snow, and love her more. She could watch her write a paper at two o’clock in the morning, fueled on nothing but hot chocolate and food-like snack cakes, and love her more. She could feel her sigh and shift in the early morning, turning in her sleep away from the insult of the early-morning light, and love her more. Nothing Laura could do—or not do—altered this feeling. It was simply her _being_ , not doing, that made her so utterly irresistible, necessary. 

She gave Carmilla a hot to-go cup, and they walked out of the shop with their unoccupied hands linked together. She was entirely separate, but completely part of the way Carmilla functioned now. Carmilla was distinct and whole on her own, she knew that, yet Laura made her feel more so. When had that happened, and how? It might take another hundred years for her to riddle that one out, but truth be told, she didn’t spend much time thinking about it anymore. There was so much to think about in this moment, to worry about how they got there. 

“What?” Laura asked, noticing Carmilla’s preoccupied expression. The sun set so early in the winter months, it was easier to come and go at their leisure without having to worry about her photosensitivity. Still, she looked illuminated under the light of the moon, as if it were a sun all her own. 

“Hmm?” she asked, turning her attention back to the present-day. 

“You looked lost,” Laura said. Carmilla shook her head.

“No, not lost,” she assured. “Decidedly not so.”

“Are we speaking in riddles now or…?” Laura asked, eliciting a throaty chuckle from Carmilla.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“Oh, let me guess,” Laura said with an exaggerated sigh of longsuffering. “ _It’s a three hundred year old vampire thing, cutie, you wouldn’t understand._ ” She tried to paint a pseudo-Carmilla expression of vague disinterest across her face, but couldn’t keep the farce for more than a few seconds without breaking into giggles. It made Carmilla laugh, genuinely laugh, the way only Laura mocking her could.

“Something like that,” she said, leaning in and kissing her.

“Hmmm, like that?” Laura asked. Carmilla leaned in and pecked her once, twice more.

“Mmhmm,” she hummed affirmatively, “Like that.”

“I guess I can live with that,” Laura said, drawing Carmilla closer as a blustery wind cut through their coats. “But only if you let me use your pockets.” She slipped her and Carmilla’s entwined hands into Carmilla’s outer coat pocket and rested her head on her shoulder.

And somehow, beyond all reason and understanding, she loved her more.


End file.
